The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  I looked over his shoulder at the painting in progress, its bold primaries having little in common with the pastel hues of the surrounding meadow. The composition repeated the moonstruck themes I’d grown accustomed to from Muni’s book: a street of unlikely juxtapositions and historic anachronisms, merchants and members of long-extinct races mingling in front of flyblown facades. But where that brazen Pinchscape might ordinarily have enthralled me, today it only gave me the willies with its mad departure from the morning’s serenity.

  Bending close to the artist, Rachel asked him (a little patronizingly, I thought), “Are you happy here, Tyrone?”

  Previously so slow to respond, he replied now without hesitation in a voice that, cracking like an adolescent’s, sounded almost sane. “Isn’t everybody?”

  Given the source, I found his answer rather chilling, but Rachel allowed herself a sigh of satisfaction. I supposed she’d earned it. After all she’d been instrumental in bringing about the artist’s improved situation, in making sure he had available the choicest materials: a stretched cotton canvas on a lyre easel (she had me to know), a watercolor palette and squirrel hair brushes. She had indeed been a busy girl. She’d conducted her interviews and written a grant that would enable her to conduct even more, and was composing a monograph based on her research. The monograph, a projected oral history of North Main Street, was the initial stage of what she hoped would result in a book—a book that might be viewed as a kind of practical companion to the one Muni Pinsker had written. That one she’d invited me to donate to the Folklore Center’s archive.

  Regarding Tyrone with an almost proprietary benevolence, she whispered to me that it might be possible to put together a show of his paintings at the center. “The naive art thing is really catching on.”

  I couldn’t help admiring her even as I suspected that her interest in Tyrone’s work was not entirely selfless. Meanwhile Tyrone, uncorked, had become almost conversational.

  “There’s thirty-nine occupations that if you do them on Shabbos you’re punished with death,” he submitted without looking up from his painting, “and Fannie Dubrovner was guilty of the worst”—the hippies appeared to be communally holding their breath—“which is to spin the wool while it’s still on the goat.” I recognized the reference from Muni’s text, but the rest was unfamiliar. “She sweated lice, Fanny, that sizzled in the oven where God put her without a kitsl or a kiss …”

  I saw Rachel shudder and thought, good, maybe she’s beginning to understand that Tyrone isn’t Mr. Dick. The painter went on offering unsolicited information: “Sanford Nussbaum carved the Lord’s name on a donkey’s hoof / and laughed to see it jump over the synagogue roof …,” while one of the hippies took scrupulous notes. Another, a girl with a pendulous bosom swinging freely beneath her gossamer shift, rose to drape a clover necklace over Tyrone’s head. He looked up to give her an appraising glance, his eyes ticktocking back and forth with the sway of her breasts, and thoughtfully remarked to his audience or himself, “Moses and Aaron.”

  “He means a nice rack,” I interpreted for Rachel, who simpered as if to say that the phrase needed no translation. The attendant rolled her eyes as if to imply that her job might be more than she’d bargained for.

  We walked to Rachel’s car, which was waiting at the curb in front of an old hotel with awninged windows overlooking the park.

  “So what do you think?” she asked as she unlocked the door.

  I was thinking that, appearances notwithstanding, there was no place that Tyrone Pin would ever really belong, and his vulnerability made me a little sick to my stomach. But as Rachel’s question had no special reference, it merited only a general response. “I think you would have to be out of your mind not to be crazy in this world,” I said.

  She awarded me a tight-lipped grin. “Or vice versa,” she replied.

  I tried to return the smile, wanting so much to parlay the moment into an intimate exchange: we were bonding again over a lunatic who was the living connection to the vanished Pinch. But a perverse impulse refused to let me take advantage of her ebullient mood. “Do you imagine that you brought him back to the Garden?” I said. Her grin reversed itself. “He’s damaged goods, Rachel. When all’s said and done, he’s just a poor defective shell-shocked ex-GI.”

  She looked puzzled: “Thus spake Lenny Sklarew.” But rather than object, she narrowed her eyes to examine me through the bore of her inquisitive squint. “Since when did you become such a scold?” she asked, not without a note of respect; then gently lowering her voice, “What’s eating you, Lenny?”

  What wasn’t eating me? I’d lost my apartment, my employers, and even, it seemed, my relation to the book that had all but eclipsed my own past—though that last was perhaps a blessing. But shouldn’t the book’s loosened hold on me allow for a tightening of Rachel’s?

  “Avrom’s dying,” I said, and felt instantly ashamed: I was exploiting the old man’s condition to gain pity for myself. All the same, it seemed to work. I made a noise like I was trying to clear my throat of my heart, and Rachel took my hand; she drew me round to the other side of the car, deposited me in the shotgun seat, and drove me home with her to her greenstone building.

  She undressed in the window outlined by the spiky sunlight whose beams appeared to emanate from her pores. She revealed herself in full consciousness of the gift she knew her body to be—its skin smooth as a blanched almond, her navel like a tiny knot in a balloon. Dayenu, I said to myself, because it would have been enough just to behold her, even had she not begun to crawl into the bed. She crawled like she was stalking me, scaring the cat, which leapt from the pillow, and began to unbuckle my belt. With every button she unbuttoned, zipper unzipped, she uttered a gasp, as if my pasty flesh and bones were some great surprise. Her lips performed lamprey-like kisses, suctioning my nipples, my thighs, my organ, which rose with comical alacrity like a jack-in-the-box, the only part of me not behaving like her victim. But once drawn into the arena of her sensuality, I wasn’t so passive anymore. Then we were indivisible, bucking and writhing as if we shared the symptoms of some saint’s disease—a sublime seizure that purified us of contaminents in the blood, such as fear. When it was over, I told her I’d ejaculated a crazy glue that would cement us together for all time. So I was bewildered at the ease with which, immediately after, she disengaged her body from mine and said she had to get to work. I couldn’t account for her abruptness, but later that afternoon, slouched again in Avrom’s “siege perilous” (perilous because it was so hard to get out of), it dawned on me she was saying good-bye.

  15

  Party in the Park

  Muni glanced again at the kid in the doorway who’d outgrown his Dutch vestee suit, his knees smudged and raw below his short pants. One stocking had fallen down around his ankle and his rust-red hair fanned his brow in an unruly cowlick.

  “Where have you been?” asked Muni, or rather he mouthed the words in silence: because it had been so long since he’d conversed with another person that his voice box had lost the knack of making sounds. But the boy seemed to have no problem reading his lips.

  “Nowhere,” he replied.

  There should have been no more need of asking the second question (“Where is your mama and papa?”) than the first, since everyone’s fate had already been recorded in Muni’s hill of loose pages. So why couldn’t Muni himself, the instrument of that record, recall what he’d inscribed? He glanced at the heap of manuscript turning sepia on the floor, then back at the boy with his faraway eyes, and realized that something was amiss: he’d awoken, it seemed, from his protracted dream and could no longer recall a single word of what he’d written. The recognition sucked the air from his lungs.

  Starting again from scratch, from nowhere, Muni inquired, “Who are you?” and this time his voice was audible, if only just.

  “I’m the boy,” replied the child with an offhand precocity, “that my papa made with my mama’s ghost. That was before it came back in her own body a
gain, the ghost.”

  It took all the patience Muni could muster to express any interest, so great was his wish to spend his sympathy on himself. “You don’t say,” he muttered; then he stood up, which was no easy undertaking, since he hadn’t stood in a very long while. He was aware of the odor his unbathed body exuded through his grubby underdrawers, the itch of his scalp and beard. His knee joints shed cobwebs and creaked like unoiled machinery; his brain felt as if an hourglass had turned over in his skull. Taking the boy’s hand less out of kindness than the need to secure his balance, the weary scribe set off with him in search of his mother and father.

  They didn’t have far to look: turn left out of the neglected nursery, shuffle to the end of the hall, open the door into the wrecked bedroom, and there in the collapsed iron bed, scattered over the disheveled sheets, was the dust of Katie and Pinchas Pin. Muni was unable to identify it at first. Despite being slightly incandescent, as what wasn’t in the Pinch in those days, it might have been egg cookie crumbs left over from a late-night snack. But a reference to his handwritten chronicle back in the nursery revealed to Muni not only what had happened but also that there were telltale clues to what was coming all along. Because one of the distractions Muni had suffered repeatedly during his marathon scribbling—distractions he’d incorporated into his text—was the noise of Pinchas and Katie’s rampant copulation from down the hall.

  Not that anyone in the Pinch could have been accused of conventional behavior, but the proprietor of Pin’s General Merchandise and his resurrected bride made noises such as their nephew had never heard in the years prior to the quake. His sleep, back in the days when Muni still slept, had seldom been interrupted by anything other than the music of the blind musician who accompanied the girl who danced on the clothesline, before the girl went away. But for all their unreserved devotion to their infant son, the physical appetite of Katie Pin for her husband, and his for her, had increased exponentially since the boy’s birth. In fact, their enduring gratitude for the gift of the child was sometimes overwhelmed by their delight in their newfound lasciviousness.

  Pinchas could reason that their intemperate relations were part of a healthy regimen. For he had it on Rabbi ben Yahya’s authority—and he was willing now to credit the rebbe with some authority—that Katie’s time on earth was imperiled, and hadn’t their steamy union in the underworld proved to have revitalizing properties? Didn’t the shtupping quite simply restore her to life? Meanwhile Katie, for her part, wanted desperately to lengthen her days for the sake of their son. Moreover, there was the mutual conviction that they were making up for lost time. But in the end their rationalizations mattered little in the face of the unabashed randiness that compelled them to fling themselves hammer and tongs into each other’s arms.

  Though each was likely to blame the other for initiating the frolic, it was usually Katie who made the first move. That might consist of no more than a shoulder shrug or a finger teasing a lock of her hennaed hair—or perhaps the scratching of an armpit, since the gesture required nothing overtly erotic, only some slight indication of the instigator’s corporal presence. Then they would come together, husband and wife, in a blind heat that caused their clothing to smolder until they tore off whatever they wore. Their bodies collided with a jarring impact that generated hairline fractures that would result later on in a splintering of bones. They tried to control their urges in a responsible fashion, to coordinate their reciprocal itch to correspond with the times when their child was asleep. But as Tyrone grew older and his napping more irregular, there were long periods when the boy was left on his own. The Pins weren’t too terribly concerned: he was a solitary kid capable of amusing himself, more wedded to fancy than material interests. (His most abiding occupation consisted in the vigilant observation of his cousin Muni at his writing.) Their periodic abandonment of Tyrone, his parents reasoned, was an unavoidable consequence of their serial abandonment of themselves, which is not to say they were able entirely to escape a measure of guilt.

  So when they weren’t fornicating to beat the band, Katie and Pinchas Pin were attempting to atone for the times when they left their child to his own devices. Coming back to themselves after their spent passion, they would coddle and indulge their son. They gave him toys he seemed to outgrow as fast as he received them, plied him with Mrs. Rosen’s compotes and choice cuts of Makowsky’s manna-fed flanken that, with his bird-like appetite, the boy scarcely touched. They took him for strolls along the canal to view the sights that beggared belief, stopping in at various storefronts, some no more than painted facades, where they introduced him to the neighbors’ children. But Tyrone showed little interest in the other kids—whose games included exorcisms and a variation of hopscotch that involved skipping over whole calendar cycles. On their side the kids, all older than he, were wary as well of Tyrone, who wasn’t so much timid as remote. Plus, he was the only kid on the street who (despite the stalled clocks) was still growing in stature and advancing in age, a dreamy boy at a moment when no one else seemed to have need of dreams.

  The cautious attitude with which the neighbors regarded the child was extended to his parents as well. It was true that the Pins had been the objects of jealousy and idle talk in the past, but back then Pinchas’s status in the community was unimpeachable, and his wife’s affability had always tended to stem the loshen horah, the gossip. Besides, Pin’s General Merchandise was the long-standing anchor of North Main Street. Now, however, all anchors had been weighed, and from their bobbing vessels and supernal vantages the population deemed the Pins a suspicious lot: their bliss was not the same as the street’s.

  For Tyrone’s sake Katie and Pinchas tried to maintain a pretense of normality. They represented themselves as solid citizens in a neighborhood whose permeability to wonders mocked the very nature of solidity. Still, Pinchas reasserted the proprietorship of his business while Katie took charge of her kitchen, the nursery, and the care and maintenance of the obsessed nephew. She helped out in the store, where her husband tried to push his damaged commodities. They didn’t seem to notice how they were perceived as violating the very spirit of the neighborhood, taking the part of earnest merchants when others only played at business. Where Pinchas endeavored to flog his waterlogged flannels and yachting caps, Leon Shapiro might offer, along with a factory rebate, an imp encased in a soap bubble, and Mr. Abraham peddled the philosophers’ stones the kiddies played potsie with. The currency they exchanged was more likely to be secrets than hard cash. But there were other reasons their neighbors signaled against the evil eye whenever they saw the Pins, other reasons why the Pins embraced their standard inventory with such a will.

  Because, despite her lickerish vitality, Katie had begun to show signs of decomposition, and out of sympathy her husband had also developed symptoms. Her fair complexion, once dusted in freckles like cinnamon in milk, had acquired a pastry-like flakiness, bits of which dropped into the lap of her apron dress. The dress itself hung from her brittle bones as from a hanger. Her formerly russet hair, discolored and dyed, began to fall out in hanks, revealing patches of scalp the texture of coconut shell. Her green eyes had faded to oyster gray and ran with a viscous humor. The more she appeared to be actively decaying, however, the friskier she became, as if that insatiable hunger might redeem her wasting flesh. But each coupling took a further toll on both her and Pinchas, who was likewise beginning to come apart. Still they yentzed with an ever more fevered determination, further decimating the selves their desire was meant to preserve.

  “Katie,” Pinchas had at last to admit while facing a merciless mirror, “let us face it, we are starting to rot.”

  To which Katie replied with a transparent optimism, “Bollocks, we’re only shedding skin.”

  But with every orgiastic release she experienced, Katie also felt the efforts of her soul attempting to escape its moldering confines. She had glimpsed it seeping out of herself like a bubble from a pipe, an amorphous rose blob suggesting the outlines of a young Iris
h bride. Then it was Pinchas’s job, sharing as he did her perception, to stuff his wife’s herniated neshomah back into whatever fissure it emerged from. But it was a dim and elusive entity, Katie’s soul, and Pinchas, in the groggy afterglow of their prodigious coition, was often slow in attempting to retrieve it. As a result, the thing had managed on several occasions to detach itself from her person. And once it ventures forth from its mortal frame the incorporeal is selfish: it feels no warmth or responsibility toward its former substance or much attachment to anything else on earth, be it husband or son. It feels only the mindless instinct to wander in the direction whence it came, and Katie’s soul might have fled halfway back to yenne velt, the other world, had not Pinchas managed to recover it in time. But occasionally the husband questioned his own selfishness in not allowing his wife her spiritual freedom. Besides, that oft-repeated effort of retrieval had worn him pretty thin and unseated his own restless spirit, which had also begun to look for a way out of its disintegrating skin. The situation had made Muni think, as he related it in his ongoing chronicle, of the escape artist Harry Houdini, who strove to release himself from straitjackets and sausage casings.

  So it was only a matter of time before the ghosts of Katie and Pinchas Pin gave up their ravaged bodies, which continued for a while to pummel one another into a glimmering dust.

  Still, their nephew wondered if he could have written their end differently, if even now it might not be too late to change their destiny: they had been in such an agony over leaving behind their only child. But when he reentered his privy-sized room, shadowed by the odd little boy, and gazed again upon the heap of his manuscript, its pages appeared to him as so much spindrift from an already receding tide. Soon, he thought, they would completely evaporate. Also scattered about the floor were a few long-abandoned toys—a wooden caboose, a tin frog, an Indian headdress from which Muni, stooping, plucked a red feather. He returned to the bedroom with the boy at his heels and used the feather to sweep the luminous crumbs from the rumpled sheets into the open palm of his hand. The boy watched him with unblinking jade-green eyes. Muni made a fist around the crumbs in his left hand—where they hissed like the interior of a nautilus shell—and with his right reached for the boy’s, whose small fingers entwined Muni’s own.